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Liberty Global plc (LBTYK)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 4, 2020

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Liberty Global Second Quarter 2020 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcasts are the property of Liberty Global and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call, or webcast in any form without the expressed and written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's Web site at libertyglobal.com. After today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. Page 2 of the slide details the company's Safe Harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements. Today’s presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects, and other information and statements that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risk include those detailed in Liberty Global’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent filed Form 10-Q as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any condition on which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Fries.

Mike Fries

Analyst

Thanks operator, and welcome everyone to our Q2 results call. First of all, I hope you’re each safe and well and as always, we appreciate you joining us today. Our plan is to run through the slides and prepared remarks for about 20 minutes or so to be sure you're level set on the key messages this quarter and then we'll spend the majority of our time answering your questions. As usual, I've asked a handful of the key execs to join me on the open line and I'll be sure to get them involved in the Q&A session as needed. I'll kick it off on Slide 4 for those who are following along with a summary of the key highlights from the quarter. It's a pretty comprehensive slide so bear with me I want to be sure to hit each point. Beginning with a few remarks and how we've been navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, this is on top of everybody's mind so I'll spend couple of minutes upfront and then we'll get into some more color and detail to the course of the presentation in Q&A. Clearly, our primary focus has been and remains the safety and wellbeing of our people, 85% to 90% of whom continue to work from home like most companies you've heard from working from home can and does work and we're no exception, of course. In our case you have to balance that but they need to be in the field, building and maintaining plant and installing and servicing customers. We're also governed by different local regulations and protocols in each country. Most of which have required that we open up offices slowly and carefully and that's exactly what we're doing. As we get back to normal, everyone in our sector is working…

Charlie Bracken

Analyst

Thank you, Mike. I’m on the slide entitled Q2 impacted COVID 19. Overall of our 4.3% Q2 consolidated year-on-year revenue decline we estimate that the COVID impact is roughly 4% or around $110 million. Within that, we estimate that the reduced revenues from premium sports accounted for $34 million and increased late charges around $8 million. B2B fixed and mobile impacts were around $19 million and reduced mobile running and reduced handset sales contributed $17 million and $10 million respectively. We also saw reduced revenues at our Irish and Belgium broadcast businesses, which we estimated $21 million. So when you consider the estimates of the covered impacts, the revenue trend is actually in line with recent quarters. We estimate that the impact of COVID on adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was minimal. Many of the impacts such as premium sports and mobile handset revenues are low margin and we also benefited from reduced churn and lower sales and marketing expenses, which help to offset more material impacts. As a result, we believe that our Q2 adjusted EBITDA growth rate was in the aggregate largely unaffected by COVID. On the on the next slide entitled group overview, we show the key financials for the group. Despite the revenue decline of 4.3%, adjusted EBITDA declined 0.4% for the quarter versus the decline of 3.6% in Q1. Property and equipment additions were 21.6% of sales in Q2 and without the impact of Lightning we’re 18.8% of sales. As a result, we saw strong operating free cash flow growth with pre Lightning construction OFCF for the quarter at $678 million, a 12% year-on-year improvement and after Lightning CapEx, $601 million, up 18.3% year on year. Group liquidity remained strong at $9.8 billion. And at quarter end, our gross debt was 5.3 times adjusted EBITDA…

Operator

Operator

The question-and-answer sessions will be conducted electronically [Operator Instruction]. And we'll go first to Steve Malcolm with Redburn.

Steve Malcolm

Analyst

Just coming back to Slide 5 and your multiples, I guess, the Telenet multiple kind of jumps out a bit trading at north of 10% free cash flow yield. I mean, this is really a question for you and the board Mike and Charlie. I mean it seems like you're not getting tremendous equity value from that stake in Telenet and the VodafoneZiggo stake. Why do you think that is? And is the board happy with the status quo? I saw you quoted in the recent sell side conference, and you'd love to own more of VodafoneZiggo. Just sort of interested to hear your thoughts on why you think the stock market is not giving you? You clearly think is fair value for your stakes in those Benelux assets and what you can do to sort that out?

Mike Fries

Analyst

Sure, and that was really the point of that side, but to talk about the FMC strategy but the punchline being that we believe if we continue along this path, which we are of course continuing on that the evaluation at least in the underlying businesses in those local markets will be there. And I think you raised Telenet that's a good example, trades at a premium to us on a number of levels. Are we getting that valuation in our stock? But I think it begins with the underlying businesses. And I think that the path we're on to drive these FMC champions to greater free cash flow yields, better stability and operating performance is the starting point. And it's clear also that local investors in many of these markets prefer to own these businesses and understand the benefits of stable and sustainable free cash flow. And as a result, as you can see on the page, are giving these businesses higher multiples and better valuation. So, if we're able to achieve those same results and the results we’ve already been achieving and we can get for example VodafoneZiggo public or perhaps even O2 UK someday, Virgin Media in the UK someday, that could be a real positive event for the stock, I'm not saying that's the only reason to look at it and it's not explaining the entire gap that we have today between underlying value and the top co, but it certainly will help to bridge that gap. And, we're all about as I've talked many times bridging that value gap. And I think that the strategy we're pursuing here is the right one. And investors need to see a few things and it wouldn't be surprising they want to see these transactions get done, so we need to get the transaction to Telefonica and the UK completed and approved and of course that will be a positive, when it is. We need to continue to show and demonstrate the sort of strong performance and cash flow that we’re demonstrating out of these businesses today. No question we have to put some of that money to work. I think the money on our balance sheet isn’t helping today for some investors. I’d like to see that money be put to work and we appreciate that, we're in the same boat. We wanted to put money to work. But it's a combination of things. But hopefully the slide shows that the path we're on is the right path for creating a long-term evaluation and that’s where we’re…

Charlie Bracken

Analyst

Mike, can I also just also add? I think we do feel it’s pretty undervalued. I think that it’s not clear to us why it would trade so distance to KPN Proximus, which have less attractive growth profiles, less stability in their cash flows, et cetera. And that's why we're certainly working with Erik and John, because I think there's a number of possibly technical reasons around liquidity to stock and/or could it be around clarity around shareholder distributions, the balance between buybacks and dividend. So I wouldn't say that we feel comfortable with the value of Telenet. We can get some more [Multiple Speakers]…

Steve Malcolm

Analyst

So that was really my question that it doesn’t seem like the current structure where you own 60% of Telenet and 50% of VodafoneZiggo, is doing great deal, either for I mean you mentioned local listing but it’s not really working with Telenet at the moment. And I guess that’s where Telenet trade and VodafoneZiggo is arguably trading below that despite really good numbers this quarter. So that was really my question to whether you think the current set up work…

Charlie Bracken

Analyst

I think we can make you the case that VodafoneZiggo has superior growth to actually any telco in Europe, so they would trade substantially. They’ve just beaten KPN in every single metric. So, I think it's fair to say that the valuation of them we would expect to be inside KPN, not the other way around, particularly with the synergies they have. I think the Telenet valuation is a head scratch here and we’re certainly aware of the disconnect and we’re talking a lot with them about it. But it’s fundamentally a very strong company, very predictable cash flows and I think at this stage, for whatever reason isn't doing the valuation. But to echo Mike's point, even at that valuation we’re trading at a discount to that.

Steve Malcolm

Analyst

I guess unusually I'm agreeing with you. Just trying to figure out whether there's a better structure out there that would close that and it’s undervalued with a new and then it’s the local listing itself is clearly at a big discount to companies like Tele2 that I think are probably performing better than at the moment [Multiple Speakers]…

Mike Fries

Analyst

I mean, we're a bit more levered than some of the stocks on this page. Of course at Telenet and VodafoneZiggo but I think the answer is the same, which is fundamentally Telenet might be undervalued, we're clearly undervalued but the strategy of creating transparent value has to do good thing overtime based on where we’re…

Operator

Operator

We’ll go next to David Wright with Bank of America.

David Wright

Analyst

Just on the UK trends, obviously, strong Internet adds, cable adds. You guys committed to maintain quite a lot of the provisioning through the lockdown period, which will surely has supported the trend, it still does stand out as a much better commercial performance. Could you maybe just add a little color on what you think is driving that? Was it perhaps that the UK consumers reacted a little bit less than you thought to the new end of contract regulation? What is that you think has really driven that market outperformance? Thank you.

Mike Fries

Analyst

I'll just say a couple things and then Lutz, I’ll let you chime in here. From my perspective, the fact that we were still installing customers actively in the field certainly advantaged us. We didn't stop installations. We felt that that was critical and essential and continued to make products and services available to consumers, which was important. And then secondly, at times like this there's usually a flight to quality. And when we're offering 500 meg across the country and the competition is a 30 or 50 year, maybe 100 in some cases or slightly more, that certainly matters. Those two things in my mind resulted in certainly better performance than we’d expected, together with reduced churn and you saw the numbers. So Lutz, you want to add to that? Lutz Schüler: Yes, I think exactly what you said Mike. I mean, what we did was we came up right at the beginning of the crisis with the generosity program for our customer to offer them more speed, offer them mobile data packages offer, removed any caps on voice, came up with free of charge broadcasting channel for kids and stuff like that. And so NPS has increased rapidly. So that's number one. Number two is, I mean, employee satisfaction also is increasing since quite some time and our few peoples stay committed to the company and so they decided to keep installing and keep expanding on it also, which was also a great contribution to the success. Thirdly, we quickly moved to digital. I mean we started the journey to digitalize search media. And now our sales channel, our digital sales channel has increased by 50% from Q1 to Q2. So the sales channel percentage of digital has increased to 68%. And on the churn side then high NPS leads to lower churn then also obviously Openreach, they have stopped installing. So therefore, you could not really churn to another network but also you’d see that our quarterly churn is going down over three consecutive quarters in a row. So therefore, we have sales momentum, we have momentum and lower churn and we have higher NPS. And also as Mike said, higher speed and higher quality matter when the connectivity is the connection to the outside world.

David Wright

Analyst

And could I possibly add then. We know that Openreach was back in the market in June with a lot more installations almost bucket kind of full run rate. Can you kind of give us any indication of the sort of intra sort of quarter trends and whether you kind of exiting the quarter, maybe a little bit more normally rather than that kind of initial spike. Was the real outperformance sort of through April, May and June maybe a little bit more muted? Lutz Schüler: So from the sales perspective, we actually accelerate momentum. So, we have not felt that our competitors are back in the market. From the churn, you see -- I mean we have seen up in I think May and April on our churn number, I mean they have a dramatically now, the churn level has come up a bit more but it's still lower than it used to be.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to James Ratcliffe with Evercore ISI.

James Ratcliffe

Analyst

Two if I could, one, is a big picture one, a lot of discussion on fixed mobile convergence and the rationale to go for the UK transaction. Can you talk about what the pitch to the customer, what the compelling proposition for the customer is on fixed mobile convergence beyond just maybe you get a bundle discount? And secondly, clear commentary about customers dropping sports packages in the wake of COVID and the lack of sports, and that there were margin. But are sports a big part of the reason people take pay TV, so can you talk about the longer term impact a lack of sports? And secondly, how profitable is the TV business for you at this point. I mean U.S. suffered indeed pretty much thrown in the towel on it, but how -- beyond as the churn reduce there, how lucrative is the TV product itself?

Mike Fries

Analyst

Lutz, you can work up what we're doing long term in the UK and at least give one example of a fixed mobile proposition to consumers today, and how that might evolve in an O2 environment. I'll stay on the TV business, of course, we evaluate this very closely across every marketplace. We still deliver and generate pretty good gross margins on our TV business in comparison to say the U.S. industry and that's principally because we don’t have massive expense in the basic package for sports. And so our gross margins vary by market but they could be as high as 60%, 75% in our TV business, that's from our point of view a nice contribution to the EBITDA and something quite important to us and we don't intend to sort of let it go, if you will, as your thinking applied. We do realize, though, that the overall economics of TV have to evolve and are evolving. And so what we're spending quite a bit of time on is reducing the cost of our -- the device we put in home, ensuring that things like sports are available on a premium basis and integrating OTT apps so that your experience is seamless. So that you turn the TV on, you just say play Netflix, play Amazon, play BBC and you're ready to rock and roll. And so we do think the entertainment platform we've developed has longevity and has relevance to consumers, because we're integrating apps, because it's cheap in spend and easy to utilize. And we intend to continue to drive the cost of that down. So there's margin in the TV business and there is profitability in the TV business. And from a sports point of view, yes, we're in sports pause, we did lose a…

Mike Fries

Analyst

You can see it. If you were to study the VodafoneZiggo results in the second quarter, but in almost every metric we've outperformed KPN and that's because we're finding the rhythm that matters to consumers in that fixed mobile space. And it is speed of this, it is not just reducing cost, it’s just giving people more. Sometimes it's more for the same, more for more, maybe even more for less sitting on the combination, more matters and that's exactly what fixed mobile convergence delivers.

Operator

Operator

We’ll go next to Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank.

Robert Grindle

Analyst

Going back to the UK, you seem to have play lockdown very well indeed, and perhaps benefit is by some of your peers not playing so well. But last week Ofcom reckons that more than 60% of your broadband customers are out of contract. Has that number been moving up quite a lot recently and do you intend to address this perhaps in H2 within the constructs of your guidance? Thank you. Lutz Schüler: So we have talked about end of contract notification, I think in the previous quarterly call. And I can confirm the message I've given there. So actually the impact of end of contract notification is less than we have planned for. So what does that mean? That means that customers are simply less challenging to get additional discounts to stay as we have planned for. So, I think that's number one. I think number two is that we think that speed matters more than ever. I mean, when you have four, five household members, Mom and Dad are doing video calls, the kids are playing or video streaming, you need speed and you need to realize the speed. And therefore, our average speed in the UK is 2.5 times higher than the average and we are working on increasing that delta. And therefore, we think that our customers, if they perceive value for money and that we are actually not so concerned about that 60% of our customers are not in contract, and we don't think that we should overrun them with big discounts to stay. And if you look at our NPS numbers, they are improving and our churn number, we are on the right path here.

Mike Fries

Analyst

I’d just say the end of contract notification period began before COVID really hit then it was largely pause for most in the industry. But during the period of time that it was active as Lutz said, we saw the churn was maybe more or less what we expected but the discount required to keep customers was also significantly less. And so in the short period of time, we had pre COVID, the end of contract impact at least for our business was less than we expected. We only more recently gotten back to engaging with customers on this, and we'll let you know when we get to our third quarter results but so far so good. Lutz Schüler: We have been 10 days offline and obviously also to support what Mike said and also in regards to our guidance, there is no average first half notification coming and we will start with that in fall. And obviously, we are careful in our planning as we have seen this end of contract notification, but we will see it at the end of the quarter…

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Nick Lyall with SocGen.

Nick Lyall

Analyst · SocGen.

I mean, you mentioned in the release that Horizons is doing quite well, so as gigabit convergence is coming up, and also you've got the Swisscom sports deal on the way, but EBITDA is still down about 11% ex the one off. So, could you just try and weigh up between -- you’re obviously making some operational changes to the business. But how long before you can start to think about say the rising revenue and EBITDA, if at all, is it still seems quite a long way away? Thanks.

Mike Fries

Analyst · SocGen.

The turnaround plan remains as it's been described in terms of our tactics and our strategy. So it's all about 1 gig, getting the TV box to EOS penetration maximized, trying to retain some of the record NPS that we've been delivering and driving the fixed-mobile convergence, which has been a steady success story for us every quarter. And then lastly keeping -- ensuring that our customer operations continue to be smooth in the digital transformation process also there's working quite well. There's a lot of positive things happening. Having said that, I mentioned the market is competitive. We have to stay competitive, which means we have to be thoughtful on pricing, and offers and packages. And I think, we didn't really provide anybody, I don’t believe, specific details as to when we would be breakeven EBITDA, when we’ll be back to growth. We continue to evaluate that timeframe, of course. And I don't know that we’ve made that public and I'm not sure we will at this point. Just to say that we still feel very positive about the plan. Even if the plan were to take a bit longer, we're in this for the long term. The plan itself is solid and sound and it looks to us like it's working. I don't know if Baptiest is on, if you want to add anything to that Baptiest around recent momentum [Multiple Speakers]…

Baptiest Coopmans

Analyst · SocGen.

I think it's like Mike says, it continues to be a very competitive market. We’re building commercial momentum and Lutz was saying that he saw growth in the quarter and we can say for Switzerland. So June was better than May and May was better than April in terms of sales. And I would like to point out that Switzerland is past the point of all the investments. If you look at the operational free cash flow margins back to 28% in the second quarter, that's not an incident. So, we have past investments of the 1 gig network in the new video platform, we’ve now taken the opportunities to really simplify the business. So this continues to be a very strong cash generated platform, there is sales history of momentum coming now.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to Matthew Harrigan with Benchmark Capital.

Matthew Harrigan

Analyst

Your industry association, ECTA, and a number of consultancies have really pointed out that a lot of the innovation and investment in your network is really just kind of translated the free rider effect almost for guys like Facebook and Google. Now you've had even more acceleration going forward maybe five years of growth on some broadband businesses. You’ve got 5G in the offering. You’ve got even more value on your network now with some of the latency issues between DOCSIS, 5G, LTE being addressed. Is there any possibility that you could capture a nice chunk of that and accelerate your growth over time? And I know right now when you look at the COVID numbers, you're kind of looking at layers and some of your revenues have been hurt, and your costs have been hurt. And at the same time, your cost structure following through with some of the things you’ve been forced to do but your revenues probably grow a little bit faster, longer term. But can you kind of layer that out and just talk how you feel as if the character of your business has changed off COVID and then the fixed-mobile convergence and hopefully getting more benefit to the network owners as opposed to people who are using the network of other companies? Mike, a little long-winded, I apologize.

Mike Fries

Analyst

I want to be sure I follow the question. It sounds like you're asking a couple things there. I mean, our network strategy, which somebody can jump in here and talk about shows us continuing to drive speeds from 1 gig to 10 gigs over time. So there's no -- the strategy is clear, whether it's through DOCSIS 4.0, whether it's fiber to the home, by the way half the homes we built in Lightning are fiber to the home build and we're going to continue to lead wherever we can the speed race, and that matters considerably to consumers. With mobile and with fixed mobile convergence, the same can be said on the wireless side. So 5G and 1 gig are a powerful combination. 5G intended even more powerful. But 5G and 1 gig is sort of the killer app. And if you look across the markets we operate in, we're the only ones really providing those options today. And in the UK, once we get to the deal with O2 closed, we’ll provide that option there as well since they've launched, I think the rate… The growth over the long term is not an accident, it's certainly something that's quite deliberate and purposeful and driven by all the things you described on the cost side. You've got lower costs. You've got synergies. On the revenue side, you've got less churn, you've got higher NPS and you continue to innovate on the networking and the bundles and the products. And consumers have shown everywhere we operate that you cannot just drive sustainable EBITDA growth, which matters but also and just as importantly, significant free cash flow margins and free cash flow. And that is where we're heading, which is ensuring that all these operations are able to deliver sustainable high margin free cash flow. And whether we dividend that to us, to ourselves, we're taking those assets public and looking at market values. We know that there's an opportunity to capitalize on this infrastructure and these retail relationships in a way that we haven't done historically. So that is basic strategy. I'm not sure I've addressed your specific question…

Matthew Harrigan

Analyst

Yes, I guess [Multiple Speakers] more succinct way to frame it, what it has been given that increased facility in your network and use. Do you think you’re going to be able to react to the pricing more than you have historically, I mean the value of your network has increased and your people are thinking -- outside companies are really benefiting from your network. I mean do you as it translates to better price power over a period of time? Lutz Schüler: [Multiple Speakers] I think our strategy shows us that we are combining four products now. We are combining fixed, mobile, voice, broadband and video. And the video product is getting more and more OTT product. What we’re doing is with the help of data we understand our customer in a perfect way. With the help of digital, we really offer combination for all these customers at the right level and therefore then we’re creating a high stickiness of our customers. Going forward, therefore, when we are successful with that, we can also sell other stuff. And this will give us, will bring us in the position where we are successful with that to also increase our margin and our pricing. And there are operators who have done that hopefully. And when you think about quad play and you think about that there is an opportunity to step there. But I think the first step is that we are able to offer quad play in a perfect way to all our customers and this is the FMC step. I don’t know if that helps?

Matthew Harrigan

Analyst

It does, thanks a lot.

Operator

Operator

We’ll go next to [Multiple Speakers] Christian Fangmann with HSBC.

Christian Fangmann

Analyst

And coming back to Switzerland, I mean I would say that the weak spots in overall pretty good results. And you mentioned that Mike earlier around Switzerland and thoughts and joining forces with Sunrise on the fiber to the home front. What are your strategic options in Switzerland down the roads? I mean, the deal last year failed, so would be interested in your thoughts there. And then a bit of a follow-up to Baptiest's point, what are we seeing in terms of market aggressiveness, ARPU and I've seen that these results are now going backwards. So, what are the trends that you're seen, roughly speaking for the second half? Is it better as bad as in H1, or can it be better because of lower investments? Thanks.

Mike Fries

Analyst

Baptiest, you can work on answer on the second one. On the first one the strategic options remaining, the same ones that we've always articulated. And I'm not going to get into speculating which of these make the most sense. But clearly as I mentioned in my remarks, we think the market would benefit from rationalization. We are trying to do our part in that. Of course, a very small part we achieved in the second quarter with the announcement of the sports deal with Swisscom, wouldn’t underestimate that. I think that's going to have a major impact in the long haul, both on our own investments in our sports product, as well as our consumers and the benefit to our consumers of having access, typical access to both sports products. We have a strong MVNO agreement with Swisscom, a very rational MVNO agreement with them that gives us great pricing, in fact a reduced pricing further in this agreement. And so, many of the operators in the marketplace, us and Swisscom, in particular are starting to make decisions and work in a manner that we think heals the marketplace. As I mentioned on the Swiss fiber announcement if you parse through that and you break it down, we're reaching already 70%, 75% of the homes with the 1 gig product. They hope to build 1.5 million out of about 4 million homes in five to seven years if they can get the financing to do that, and that makes sense to us. If I were in their shoes, I would certainly look at something like that. They see the infrastructure capital sloshing around, they figure one that to us and us try to put something to work that realize -- that makes our reliance on Swisscom less, and I appreciate that strategic decision. Those things will take time and will be expensive. And let's see what the ultimate market situation looks like in five to seven years. In the meantime, we just keep our heads down and push the benefits of our network and our products, which are pretty strong. And I think I'm not going to give you guidance here on when the numbers start to continue to look better on the financial front. But you can see that customer adds certainly better than the last two quarters, or same as last quarter, better than the quarter prior to that. And the market improvement here it’s going to take a little bit more time than we probably thought but the trajectory looks good and we're still confident. And the number one thing here is to drive free cash flow. But whatever yield you want on the 170 million of free cash flow, there's meaningful equity value in this business. You continue to drive free cash flow, that's the metric that matters in this particular instance. Baptiest, you want to provide some color on the ARPU and…

Baptiest Coopmans

Analyst

No, I think the free cash flow of this quarter confirms the 170 going forward, and that’s intrinsically in this business. Secondly, the top line of Switzerland has been low margin COVID impact that Charlie explained. If you look under the roof, the B2B business continues to grow. So the core B2B business still grows 2% if you take out the low margin impact of COVID. In the consumer business, we delivered if you look at broadband lines that trend starts to improve. But we found our way in new advertising, we found our way with better distribution, we found our way in the promotion price points. And I just would like to reiterate the exit run rate of the quarter is good. And NPS, the Net Promoter Score, has never been as high as we can go back for UK and Switzerland. So the momentum is there. It's a matter of time now but from a stable free cash flow platform.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our last question from James Ratzer with New Street Research.

James Ratzer

Analyst

Two questions, please. Just coming back to the UK. The first one is kind of bigger picture one around your strategy. I mean, I was wondering if you are kind of pivoting the strategy, now it's becoming a little bit more price competitive. I mean, I've seen that you've been sending letters out saying no price rises this year, and you've extended your introductory offer period from 12 to 18 months, both of which would seem to be making you more price competitive versus the competition. So I was wondering if this is a little bit of a pivot in strategy to help support KPIs? And then the second question I have really was just trying to quantify the impact of end of contract notification and the best tariff notification as well. I mean, you're saying excluding sports, ARPU in the quarter seem to fall from about 1.2% growth to being flat. How much of that is actually driven by end of contract and best tariff? What percentage of your customer base now actually have had these notifications? So I mean you're telling us it's in line with expectations, maybe you could steer us towards what you think that impact will be when it's worked its way fully through the base, that would be great. Thank you.

Mike Fries

Analyst

James, I don’t think we provided any guidance, specific monetary guidance on end of contract at the beginning of the year. We said in our original guidance that there's about £100 million of headwinds, which included end of contract and annual best tariffs, as well as rates, network taxes and things of that nature. So I don’t think we’ve broken that down into components. What we said is that the end of contract experience prior to closing was better than expected, not as expected in the sense that the churn numbers were largely what we expected them to be, but the amount of discount we had to offer to achieve those levels was less. And I think we've only got -- it’s always been a very short period of time that we reactivated end of contract, so not much color to give you there. But third quarter, we’ll get back on the phone in November, we’ll certainly have a longer track record to give you an sense of how things are moving. And Lutz you can dig in on the price increase, which as you correctly say, has been pushed down here and I think that makes total sense in the environment that we’re in, taking into consideration this uncertain time for customers, it seems from our point of view a very appropriate thing to do but at least has a great plan, which we just approved to go ahead and actually neutralize the impact of that price increase not occurring in the fourth quarter through greater volume growth. So you can talk about that quickly, Lutz? Lutz Schüler: So, first, the ARPU question. And the development of the ARPU from Q2 ‘18 to ‘19, so exactly a year ago, was an ARPU growth of 0.5%. Now, if you now…

Mike Fries

Analyst

Yes. Well, thanks everybody. I know we’re at of the top of the hour here a little bit past. So, appreciate you joining us as always and appreciate your support. Hope you stay well and safe for the rest of this summer. We've got a lot of positive things happening, we talked about those today, the UK transaction on track, great performance, all things considered through all of our markets in this COVID pandemic period and we're coming out of it with a lot of positive momentum. So, look forward to talking to you in November. Take care.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global second quarter 2020 investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global website. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation material.